Lived experience to lived experience expertise : Embracing lived experience in Australian criminology

This paper, authored by some individuals with lived experience of the Australian criminal legal-punishment system, serves as a call to action for their recognition and integration within the criminal legal sector. We highlight the importance of acknowledging the deep personal nature of criminal legal-punishment system experiences, which, though potentially traumatic, offer valuable insights for improving social justice outcomes. Through vignettes, we discuss some of the challenges of integrating lived experiences into professional roles within the criminal legal-punishment system. Ultimately, by drawing from our own experiences, we argue for the meaningful involvement of individuals with lived prison experience in relevant Australian conversations and decisions. We emphasise that in Australia, lived experience should be seen as an expert contribution to the field of criminology, advocating for a more inclusive and participatory approach in policy and academic discourse.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.